Top architect Patrik Schumacher blames the rise of woke for 'the end of architecture' as he says today's buildings look the same as those from 100 years ago
'Prevailing woke culture' is to blame for the lack of architectural advancements over the last century, according to one of Britain's most revered architects.
Patrik Schumacher, who played major roles in the design of sites such as the Guangzhou Opera House in China and the London Aquatics Centre, has said that 'woke virtue-signalling' has ruined his trade.
Schumacher has claimed that it is a rise in wokeness which has paved the way for a stagnation of innovation, resulting in the majority of contemporary buildings looking like they could have been designed 50 or even 100 years ago.
The root of the problem lies in how architecture is taught to students, the 63-year-old decried.
Architecture is now presented in a manner which 'repels students with intellectual ambition', with those who do enter the field having undergone an 'increasingly incestuous academic culture of dilettante distraction', Schumacher said.
'The discipline has self-dissolved, eroding its intellectual and professional autonomy under the pressures of anti-capitalist politicisation and woke virtue-signalling.
'We are witnessing the end of architecture, the voluntary self-dissolution of architecture.', he added.
Schumacher currently oversees Zaha Hadid's architectural firm, a role which he assumed following the celebrated British-Iraqi architect's death in 2016.
Patrik Schumacher (right) pictured with Zaha Hadid (left) in 2015 at the Kensington Palace Summer Gala
The London Aquatics Centre built for the 2012 Olympic Games
The Guangzhou Opera House, China
The Opus Tower, Dubai
The Maxxi National Museum, Rome
The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan
Other notable structures which the firm designed include Dubai's Opus Tower, Beijing's Daxing International Airport, the Maxxi Museum in Rome and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Espousing his opinions on the decline of architecture, Schumacher wrote in the Khorein Journal that: 'The bulk of architecture designed in 2024 could have been designed in 1974 or indeed in 1924. It is not only stagnant but positively regressive.
'All styles, with the exception of parametricism, are retro-styles: minimalism, neo-modernism, neo-rationalism, neo-classicism, neo-historicism, neo-postmodernism'.
Returning his attention to architectural education, Schumacher delivered a condemnatory assessment of its current form: 'This dismal state of the discipline, and the sinking standards (together with the prevailing woke culture) in schools of architecture, attracts a fitting (or rather misfitting) student population, while it repels students with intellectual ambition.
'Architecture is dead because the remaining architects work and speak into a void, are closed into an ever-diminishing echo chamber, isolated by an ever more gaping abyss or suffocating vacuum'.
This is not the first time Schumacher has waded into controversy, with the architect having previously called for the privatisation of all public land and the abolishment of social housing as a way to end London's housing crisis.
Under his stewardship, Zaha Hadid Architects is also suing Hadid's charitable foundation over royalty payments for the use of her name.
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